At FiveThirtyEight, Geoffrey Skelley writes:

“Republicans are favored to hold on to the Senate, as they currently have a 53-to-47 seat edge, which means Democrats must gain a net of four seats for outright control, or three seats and the vice presidency, as the vice president casts the tiebreaking vote. What’s more, the competitive races in the Senate in 2020 will probably be on Republican-leaning turf, which should give the GOP a baseline advantage. However, Democrats’ silver lining is that the GOP has to defend 23 of the 35 seats on the ballot next year, and election forecasters Inside Elections, Sabato’s Crystal Ball and The Cook Political Report currently rate Democrats’ opportunities to pick up seats more favorably than Republicans’. (Though Republicans, of course, can win the Senate by simply hanging on to the seats they have.)

And keep in mind that the presidential race at the top of the ticket may be critical in determining which party wins control because of just how nationalized our elections have become. In the 2016 election, for instance, every state with a Senate race backed the same party for both president and Senate for the first time ever.

Skelley provides a chart showing the current “partisan lean” of every 2020 U.S. Senate race, and notes that “all five GOP senators defending seats in states with a partisan lean of less than R+10 saw their approval ratings worsen in the third quarter of 2019, according to data from Morning Consult. And all but one — Arizona Sen. Martha McSally — has a net negative rating (approval rating minus disapproval rating).”

At this political moment, polls indicate that the most vulnerable Republican Senators include Tillis (NC) and Ernst (IA), in addition to McSally. Skelley rates the Gardner (CO) and Collins (ME) races in toss-up territory. Plus there is an open seat in GA, where Dems may benefit from favorable demographic trends since 2016.

As for Democratic seats, Skelley notes that “in currently competitive contests (that is, those not rated as “safe” for either party), only Minnesota Sen. Tina Smith saw a decline in her net approval, although it remains fairly positive overall (+13).” Doug Jones (MS) has the toughest race, followed by Democratic Sen. Gary Peters (MI). Dems may need a landslide presidential win to regain a majority of the U.S.  Senate.

Absent that landslide, Dems have a pretty narrow path to regaining a Senate majority. Sure it could happen, with some strong candidates. But Dems may profit more from studying how gubernatorial candidates Stacy Abrams and Andrew Gillum nearly won their 2018 statewide races in GA and FL respectively.

From “Health care is on the ballot in state elections starting next week: Thousands of lives are at stake in mostly ignored upcoming elections” by Matthew Yglesias at Vox:

…A recent study from four researchers — University of Michigan economist Sarah Miller; University of California, Los Angeles public health scholar Laura Wherry; National Institutes of Health’s Sean Altekruse; and Norman Johnson with the US Census Bureau — estimates that failure to expand Medicaid leads to about 15,600 extra deaths per year just among people ages 55-64.

After the passage of the ACA, Democratic states mostly took the expansion money, adding over 7 million more Americans to insurance rolls in recent years. GOP-run states mostly didn’t, though a handful of GOP governors have accepted expansion funding but done so under waiver systems that let them impose heavy work requirements and other administrative burdens on recipients.

Originally, the ACA stipulated that states that failed to expand Medicaid would lose their existing federal funding, which would have made expansion all but inevitable. But a 6-3 Supreme Court ruling in which the five conservative justices were joined by Elena Kagan struck down that punitive aspect of ACA expansion as unconstitutional.

The decision set off a years-long series of state-by-state battles with very real stakes. Next week several of those fights are coming to a head.

Yglesias notes that November’s governorship elections in Kentucky, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Virginia will determine whether or not hundreds of thousands of low and moderate-income people in those states will have access to life-savng health care. He explains that “Leaders in the four states have rejected or put tough restrictions on extremely generous federal matching funds allocated under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) to extend their Medicaid programs to cover families earning up to 133 percent of the federal poverty level.” Democratic victories in those states would mean new hope for thousands of seriously-ill people in thiose states.

“In Kentucky and Louisiana,” Yglesias adds, “Republican candidates want to keep or set new work requirements for Medicaid recipients while Democrats want to lift or prevent them.” In Mississippi Democrats have “a strong candidate in longtime Attorney General Jim Hood, and the (scant) polling has shown a tight race between him and Lt. Gov. Tate Reeves…the mere fact that it’s such a long-shot race would send a clear signal about the potency of the Medicaid expansion as an issue.” In Virginia,

Republicans currently hold narrow two-seat advantages in both the state Senate and the House of Delegates, but [Democratic Governor] Northam carried strong majorities in districts for both houses during his 2017 election. That, plus strong fundraising and polling that seems to show Trump has become even less popular in Virginia over time, makes Democrats very optimistic about the ability to flip both chambers despite the cloud of scandal hanging over their statewide elected officials.

The implications of a possible flip in control are wide-ranging, especially that they include control over the redistricting process after the 2020 census, but, of course, extend to health care. A Democratic state legislature would likely lift those restrictions on eligibility and could even join other Democratic-run states in experimenting with larger expansions of government-provided health insurance.

“Virginia could be the perfect example of how Democrats, if they’re disciplined and take the long view, can flip a state legislature that’s been gerrymandered in two cycles,” says Chris Bachman, founder of Virginia Matters and a digital political consultant to several in the class of 2017, as well as some 2019 hopefuls,” Joan Walsh reports at The Nation. Walsh adds that women candidates and activists are leading the Democratic surge in Virginia, which provides “a test case of whether they could undo the damage of 10 years of ignoring state legislative races…Nancy Guy, who’s running for another Virginia Beach delegate seat, put it this way at a Saturday canvass launch: “Virginia has the chance to lead the nation again—to be the first state in the South to flip Democratic in modern times. We can join the 21st Century from the 19th!”

It’s encouraging that, despite all of the noise about impeachment and Trump’s distractions du jour, Democrats have kept a sustained focus on the most pivotal issue for millions of Americans — health security. That’s why next month’s elections could set the stage for a Democratic landslide in 2020.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again. The key demographic in the 2020 election is likely to be white noncollege women. If Trump loses enough support among this group, he’s done.

More evidence for this comes from the latest Democracy Corps/Voter Participation Center survey. This phone/web survey was conducted in what they refer to as the Presidential/Senate battleground, which includes these 17 states, divided into four regions:

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Is Trump Doomed? Probably Not.

EJ Dionne uses his latest column in the Washington Post to tackle this issue, in the process discussing the implications of my latest report.

“The situation Democrats face is…more treacherous than they might want to believe, given that a flailing Trump seems to be losing the messaging war on impeachment rather badly. Yes, the public seems ready to throw Trump out of office. But will Democrats make that easy or hard?

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

Ron Brownstein has just published an excellent analysis on the Atlantic site based on my new Path to 270 in 2020 report. If you can’t read my report, at least read this article! Brownstein:

“The risk in Donald Trump’s base-first electoral strategy is only rising—because the size of his base is shrinking.

Working-class whites are on track to continue declining as a share of eligible voters in 2020, according to a study released today by the liberal think tank Center for American Progress. In turn, two groups much more resistant to Trump will keep growing: Nonwhite voters will swell substantially, while college-educated white voters will modestly increase.

These shifts in the electorate’s composition may seem small, but they could have big implications next year. The report projects that these demographic changes alone could provide Democrats a slim Electoral College majority by reversing Trump’s narrow victories in the three blue-wall states that keyed his 2016 victory: Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Indeed, the shifts could be enough to narrowly tip these states back toward the Democrats even if college- and non-college-educated whites and minorities behave exactly as they did in 2016—if their turnout rates stay the same and if they split their votes between Trump and the Democratic nominee in exactly the same proportions as they did then.

And, if all other voting patterns hold equal, these changes alone could add another percentage point to the Democratic nominee’s margin of victory in the national popular vote, giving that candidate an advantage over Trump of more than 3 points. All told, the study, provided exclusively to The Atlantic, underscores how narrow a pathway the president is following headed into 2020.

If Democrats “are relying on demographic change to win, you are praying nothing else will change, and you are hoping to squeak out a victory by the tiniest margins,” Teixeira says. But it is a “bonus” for Democrats, he explains: “Even if [Trump] accomplished exactly what he did in 2016, he would probably lose the election. So he not only has to do that; he has to try to do more.”….

Given the resistance Trump has faced from minorities and college-educated whites, especially women, the report’s findings highlight how much he will depend next year on maximizing both turnout and his margins among white voters without a college degree. Yet both goals could prove challenging. Though Trump remains extremely popular with non-college-educated white men, an array of polls shows him suffering erosion among white women without a college degree, a group that notably moved away from the GOP in 2018.

And even if Trump, as he’s shown the capacity to do, can further juice turnout among non-college-educated whites, especially outside of urban areas, those gains could be offset by higher engagement among the groups that are growing in the electorate. That’s what happened last year: Working-class whites turned out at elevated levels for the midterms, but that increase was swamped by a spike in participation among college-educated whites and minorities. As a result, blue-collar whites plummeted by 4 percentage points as a share of the total vote compared with the 2014 midterms, according to calculations by Michael McDonald, a University of Florida political scientist who specializes in voting behavior. That’s an unusually large decline.

Something like that could happen again in 2020, Teixeira notes. “They can shrink [more] if everyone else comes out—that is the nature of the beast,” Teixeira says. “This is part and parcel of the challenge that Trump will face. He is utterly dependent on this group, but he can’t really stop their ongoing decline as a share of voters … In a high-turnout election, things may turn out even worse” for them, given the growth among other demographic groups.

The report makes clear that Trump could again manage a narrow Electoral College win, even if he loses the popular vote. (Teixeira believes that the demographic trends virtually ensure he won’t win the most voters overall.) Non-college-educated whites, even after their expected decline, will still represent a much larger share of the total vote in the key Rust Belt battlegrounds than they do nationally. And in many of the Sun Belt battlegrounds, Democrats have struggled to turn out growing minority populations, failed to match their gains elsewhere among college-educated whites, or both. The strong economy might also allow Trump to suppress defections among college-educated white men and possibly make some gains among black and Latino men.

Taken together, these factors could mean, as I wrote on Election Day in 2016, that the Democratic coalition in the Rust Belt again crumbles faster than it coalesces in the Sun Belt, allowing Trump to break through to another win. But the study also pinpoints the inexorable math pressing on Trump’s exclusionary vision for the GOP: His most likely path to a second term will require him to squeeze even bigger advantages out of dwindling groups.

Trump’s incendiary populism has been unable to reverse the tides of demographic change that, like an ocean encroaching on a beach, are diminishing the constituencies most drawn to him. And that unstinting current of change leaves him with even less margin for error in 2020 than in 2016.”

Harold Meyerson, editor at large of The American Prospect, has a post, “How Elizabeth Warren Can Address the Medicare for All Question,” which merits a read from those who want to make sure Dems have a credible consensus on health care reform when the 2020 election rolls around.

Meyerson notes that “Elizabeth Warren is now dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s on her own Medicare for All plan, which she has pledged to release shortly. As David Dayen astutely notes today, the plans put forth by Warren’s and Bernie Sanders’s primary opponents—chiefly, Joe Biden and Pete Buttigieg—will, if they’re any good, end up costing about as much as the Medicare for All proposals they’ve disparaged.”

Meyerson emphasizes Warren’s point that “the great majority of Americans pay far more for their private insurance than they would in higher taxes, though what they pay now is largely concealed from them because their employer routinely takes it out of their pay.” The media could do a better job of addressing the issue with sound research. Medicare for All supporters need some better soundbites to make the case that their plan is economically sound.

Top poll analysts have noted that public support for ‘Medicare for All’ lags far behind support for ‘Medicare for all who want it.” Some of that skepticism is due to the way the poll questions are framed, some of it emanates from the difficulty of evaluating and explaining economic factors. But most of it comes from a public perception that freedom of choice is important for health care.

Meyerson asks, “How can Elizabeth Warren address the major savings workers can win by shifting to Medicare for All?” He shares this quote attributed to Steve Tarzynski, president of the California Physicians Alliance:

Right now, you and your family pay $18,000 a year in premiums for employer-sponsored insurance that doesn’t even cover everything and that you could lose at any time. Plus another $2,000 in deductibles before it even kicks in and another $1,000 in co-pays. That’s about $21,000 every year for a basically defective product. That’s the “private tax” you’re paying right now. And your choice of doctor is restricted and you can even lose access to your doctor at any time. All that would go away with Medicare for All—no more premiums, no more deductibles, and no more co-pays. And all the care you and your family need will be covered and can never be taken away. You can choose any doctor you want. Yes. You’ll pay $5,000 more in taxes for all of that. But it will put $16,000 back in your pocket. And it doesn’t even include the share of the premium that your employer pays now that you could get back in wages and salary. Would you settle for that?

That’s about as good a one-paragraph economic case for Medicare for All as can be made. The question is, can it be sold to the public during the next year? For high-information voters – those who seriously read and think about it with an open mind – maybe so. For low-information, time-challenged and otherwise distracted voters, probably not.

The Democratic presidential nominee should build a consensus between the two proposals that can unify Democrats and progressives, perhaps including incentives for private insurance policy-holders to buy in to Medicare. The idea is to win a healthy majority of voters who can say, “the Democrats’ health care reform plan doesn’t do everything I want, but it’s the best one out there.”

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The Path to 270 in 2020!

It’s coming out this Thursday from CAP, authored by myself and my colleague John Halpin!

In the report we discuss in detail what the Democratic nominee, whoever he or she may, needs to do to put together the requisite 270 EVs, as well as what Trump needs to do to win a second term. Strictly objective and based on hard numbers, we look at the overall national picture and no fewer than 15 potential swing states, breaking down R and D objectives in each state. The states we cover are Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio, Iowa, Arizona, Texas, New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Virginia, Something for everyone.

The following article by Ruy Teixeira, author of The Optimistic Leftist and other works of political analysis, is cross-posted from his blog:

The allegation that robots are going to put huge chunks of the workforce on the unemployment line got a workout at the latest Democratic debate. As Paul Krugman noted, the Democratic candidates mostly gave terrible answers because they buy into this story about our economic trajectory–an assumption that is not remotely justified.

“[CNN moderator Erin] Burnett declared that a recent study shows that “about a quarter of U.S. jobs could be lost to automation in just the next 10 years.” What the study actually says is less alarming: It finds that a quarter of U.S. jobs will face “high exposure to automation over the next several decades.”

But if you think even that sounds bad, ask yourself the following question: When, in modern history, has something like that statement not been true?

After all, in the late 1940s America had about seven million farmers and around 12 million production workers in manufacturing. Machinery could and did take over much of the work those Americans were doing — and people at the time wondered where the new jobs would come from. If you think that concerns about automation are somehow new, bear in mind that Kurt Vonnegut’s novel “Player Piano,” envisioning a dystopian future in which machines have taken away all the jobs, was published in … 1952.

Yet the generation that followed was a golden age for American workers, who saw dramatic increases in their income, with many entering a rapidly growing middle class.

You might say that this time is different, because the pace of technological change is so much faster. But that’s not what the data say. On the contrary, worker productivity — which is how we measure the extent to which workers are being replaced by machines — has lately been growing much more slowly than in the past; it rose less than half as much from 2007 to 2018 as it did over the previous 11 years.” (See chart below)

So whose game are we playing when we buy into this robots-will-take-all-our-jobs hysteria? Krugman has an answer and I believe he is correct.

“So what’s with the fixation on automation? It may be inevitable that many tech guys like Yang believe that what they and their friends are doing is epochal, unprecedented and changes everything, even if history begs to differ. But more broadly, as I’ve argued in the past, for a significant part of the political and media establishment, robot-talk — i.e., technological determinism — is in effect a diversionary tactic.

That is, blaming robots for our problems is both an easy way to sound trendy and forward-looking (hence Biden talking about the fourth industrial revolution) and an excuse for not supporting policies that would address the real causes of weak growth and soaring inequality.

So harping on the dangers of automation, while it may sound tough-minded, is in practice a sort of escapist fantasy for centrists who don’t want to confront truly hard questions.”

Amen. What Democrats should be talking about instead of promoting scare stories about robots is something quite different–an actual program for promoting faster economic growth, which we are not getting and which we desperately need. Matt Yglesias:

“The simple fact of the matter is that productivity growth has been slow in recent years, in both the United States and other advanced countries. If the pace of automation were speeding up, you’d expect to see the opposite — output per hour worked would soar in response to the deployment of all the new technology.

And not only has growth productivity been slow, it keeps turning out to be slower than previous forecasts had expected — forcing the Congressional Budget Office to continually reduce its forecasts.

Seen through this lens, the striking thing about automation in the contemporary United States is how little of it there is…..

The result is slow growth in the overall economy which contributes to slower growth in wages and incomes. But though candidates certainly touched on points that are related to these issues, nobody directly mentioned the growth slowdown, much less propose solutions to it…..

35 years later, we know that the post-Reagan high-inequality era has not, in fact, generated sustainably faster growth than what we saw before. The economy has become more unequal, but growth has slowed. And it’s that slowdown in growth that makes the runup in inequality so unforgivable. If the rising tide was genuinely lifting all boats, people probably wouldn’t care so much about what the top one percent is up to. But the promised growth never arrived, and people are legitimately mad about it.

The lack of growth is a huge problem and it deserves serious solutions — including many of the kinds of specific things Democrats discussed relating to anti-trust law, labor unions, and investing in children — but to start you need to acknowledge the problem exists. And that means not dazzling people with fake stories of a robot revolution.”

Indeed, this robots obsession is a loser. Let’s start talking about what’s really important.

Democrat Dan McCready, a Marine Corps veteran who nearly won NC-9 a few weeks ago, has a highly instructive op-ed in The New York Times. As McCready wites:

In a special election on Sept. 10, my campaign came an inch short of flipping a deep red congressional seat in North Carolina. We lost, but we showed how Democrats can win nationwide in 2020.

On paper, a Democrat never should have been competitive in my district — it hadn’t elected one since John F. Kennedy was president. Over time, the Ninth District had been gerrymandered to include Charlotte’s prosperous, Republican-leaning suburbs, its conservative exurbs, and rural counties left behind by Washington’s trade deals.

In 2016, our district’s voters supported President Trump by almost 12 points — yet last month we came within two points of winning. In the Charlotte suburbs, we outperformed President Trump’s margin by more than 16 points.

MaCready, who also lost by just 907 votes in last years midterm elections, in “the largest case of election fraud in recent American history, targeting minority voters and tampering with their absentee ballots,” ran again as a result of a ‘re-do’ vote called  by election officials.

“My team knew our job would be harder than in 2018,” McCready explains. “Many Democrats were less likely to go to the polls in an off-year special election.” However, “Despite coming up short, we did better than many expected…” Some lessons from his experience he believes Democrats can use:

First, we grounded our campaign in values. We Democrats can sometimes get stuck in policy jargon and cede the language of values, where voters really make decisions, to Republicans. In our campaign, we flipped this around.

I built trust with voters by talking about what motivated me to serve. I was a 35-year-old father of four who had never held elected office, but I felt a calling to serve because I thought politicians needed to bring our country together, not tear it apart. During the campaign, I explained to voters that I had felt a similar calling after Sept. 11, 2001, which led me to join the Marine Corps. When I led a platoon of 65 Marines in Iraq, we never cared about your background, skin color or political party.

I likewise emphasized my business experience. When I built a solar energy company, I collaborated with Republicans and Democrats to put 700 people to work. That’s the kind of leadership, I said, that was missing in Washington.

I also wasn’t afraid to share how my faith led me to run, and then helped me press on through challenging times as we battled the election fraud.

So while I talked about policy, I anchored my candidacy in the things that connect us all. In the end, voters told me they trusted me because they got the real me. It’s a great lesson. We all have our own stories to tell. Lead with the heart, and the rest will follow.

In terms of issues, McCready notes,

Second, when it came to policy, I met voters where they were. We focused not on the daily drama in Washington, but on people’s everyday struggles. Voters told me that instead of more partisan fighting, they needed help to afford medication and doctors’ visits. I promised to work across party lines in Congress to lower health care and prescription drug costs. Voters welcomed my proposal to stand up to big drug companies, fix Obamacare and expand Medicaid.

To be sure, some activists wished I favored a stronger government hand in my health care proposal. But once they got to know me, they poured their hearts into our race because they knew my values and saw that we had the same goal of affordable and quality health care for every American. This taught me how important it is to avoid policy purity tests and focus on the goals we all share.

This approach also insulated me from some of my opponents’ appalling tactics. Republican groups spent over $6 million lying about my character. They told voters I supported infanticide. They tried to scare voters with racist dog whistles. President Trump and Vice President Mike Pence even came down on the eve of the election to throw fuel on the fire.

But because we took the time to build a foundation of values and common-sense policy ideas, most persuadable voters found those attacks unbelievable.

McCready’s third point is that “running in a district like mine doesn’t mean a candidate has to sacrifice the Democratic base to win the middle. In fact, the trust we built early on, which we strengthened over countless coffee chats and town halls, set our base on fire. We didn’t always agree on policy specifics, but we trusted one another, and we became like family.”

He notes that “Our volunteers knocked on 200,000 doors in the largest congressional field effort people in North Carolina can remember. Suburban women of all backgrounds led the charge, motivated not just by our message of unity but also by my opponents’ and the president’s attacks on our democratic norms and values.”

Fourthly, McCready writes, “we didn’t give up on rural America, and Democrats elsewhere shouldn’t either.” Further,

In the rural areas of our district, politicians had left everyone behind — white, African-American and Native American voters alike. Political engagement was low as voters were fed up with broken promises by Washington politicians on both sides of the aisle. White and socially conservative Native American voters were moving Republican, while many African-American and Native American voters who voted Democrat were unlikely to choose to vote in an off-year election, especially one without local races on the ballot.

Still, in the rural areas, we exceeded Democrats’ 2016 performance, both last month and in the November 2018 midterm election. And we did that by showing up. Rural African-American communities mobilized because we worked hard to engage with local leaders and hear and speak to these voters’ needs, spending time in churches and small towns where many candidates rarely bothered to go. We gave them a reason to turn out. And look what happened: We rooted out election fraud that had festered for years and gave voters back their voice.

“If Democrats lead with our values, meet voters where they are and show up everywhere, we can do amazing things,” McCready concludes. “If Democrats nationwide replicate our 10-point gain next year, we will pick up 35 seats in the House and five seats in the Senate, and win every presidential battleground state. Bringing our country together depends on it.”